World War Two
Published on 27 Apr 2019In this special episode of War Against Humanity, we take a look at the underlying neurological functions that allow us to hate another group of people. Maybe it helps us to understand the ultimate question about WW2; how on earth could all of this happen?
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvWritten and Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced and Directed by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Spartacus OlssonArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
April 30, 2019
The Neurology of Hate – WW2 – WaH SPECIAL EPISODE
April 29, 2019
QotD: Prostitution
I had a few patients who were prostitutes. I remember one well-dressed lady in her 40s, whose profession I asked in the course of my history-taking.
“Dominatrix,” she said.
She was obviously very good at it because she had an international clientele, including, for example, a judge in Alabama. She told me that she never went anywhere in her car without her kit, for she might receive an emergency call at any time from Hong Kong or South Africa. You might have thought that being whipped by one woman in black fishnet stockings was as good as being whipped by another, but apparently this was (and I presume still is) not so: It’s the words and gestures that go with the whipping that count as well.
This activity of hers gave her a very good living (her car was far better than mine); she was sending her daughter to private school. I admired her enterprise and thought of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Was she or the judge in Alabama to blame? Was either of them to blame at all?
Of course, she wasn’t typical of the profession, and hard cases, as they say, make bad law. But I am not at all sure that I saw the poor prostitutes in my street as merely victims, as the new French law would have them. Not everyone with their life history becomes a crack-taking prostitute. This does not mean that I did not pity them for what they had become. If we can truly sympathize only with those who have done nothing to contribute to their own fate, we shall have very restricted sympathies indeed.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Turning Tricks Into Sympathy”, Taki’s Magazine, 2016-04-09.
April 27, 2019
Dating is dead
Suzanne Venker discusses the state of dating among the love-lorn Millennials and new-to-relationships members of Generation Z:
Remember when it [dating] was viewed as a step toward a committed relationship or even marriage?
Tell that to anyone under 40, and they’ll look at you like you have three heads.
[…]
According to … the Wall Street Journal, Generation Z, most of whom are currently college-age, is “uniquely bad at dating.” The men and women of this generation are less independent, less resilient and more sheltered than previous generations, it says — and these factors make this generation “romantically challenged.”
That may very well be true, but it’s hardly the end of the conversation.
There are numerous factors at play that explain why men and women under 40 can’t sustain love, or why they can’t manage to get married and build a life together. In my next few posts, I will outline those reasons and offer solutions for how parents and educators can help young people correct what I personally consider to be the most pressing issue of our time.
The first and most obvious is that Generation Z, as well as the Millennials who preceded them, have been given zero guidance and encouragement when it comes to building a relationship with the opposite sex. Women in particular have been explicitly and repeatedly told to do just the opposite: postpone marriage as long as possible, while enjoying the supposed benefits of commitment-free sex, and make a career the center of their lives.
Given this cultural script, why wouldn’t we expect dating to die and relationships to fail? We specifically moved women away from this goal. It’s not their fault — it’s the fault of the adults who failed them.
If a woman’s professional life is considered the #1 most important thing, there’s no reason to date in the traditional sense of the word. The purpose of dating is to determine whether or not the other person is a match, potentially for life. Why go through all the rigamarole if marriage isn’t on your radar? Might as well hookup until you’re ready to settle down.
April 10, 2019
Theodore Dalrymple on obesity
His latest in the New English Review:
It hardly requires me to point out that obesity has become a greater threat to the health of the human population in most parts of the world than famine. There was a wonderful cartoon recently in the British magazine, The Oldie, which captured this perfectly. A mother is taking a plate of food away from her child, who is protesting. “Think of the obese millions!” she says to him. When I was young, of course, we were told to finish what was on our plate and to think of the starving millions. Being a precocious little brat, I used to ask how eating what I did not want would help them. Let us just say that the reply was seldom well-reasoned, either in form or content.
It has now become an almost unassailable orthodoxy, at least in medical journals, that obesity is an illness in and of itself: that is to say, it does not merely have medical consequences, but — even without those consequences — is a disease. To be fat is, ipso facto, to be ill, in the same sense as to have Parkinson’s disease is to be ill.
Nor, according to the modern orthodoxy, is obesity to be considered the natural consequence of bad or foolish individual choices, a lack of self-control. That would be to blame the victim. The fat person is in effect the vector of forces that play upon him or her, without any contribution on his or her part.
This is an idea of long gestation. Reading an old text on obesity, published in 1975, and edited by one of my medical mentors, I came across the following quote from a paper written in 1962:
I wish to propose that obesity is an inherited disorder and due to a genetically determined defect in an enzyme: in other words that people who are fat are born fat, and nothing much can be done about it.
This is like saying that addicted people are born to be addicted, and until doctors discover a technical means of stopping their addiction, they might as well make no efforts on their own behalf. No doubt the people who adhere to this view – that obesity and addiction are illnesses simpliciter – think they are being generous but in fact they are forging psychological manacles. No doubt the fat woman in the bakery was at some level trying to prove to herself that obesity was a fatality and not under any possible individual control.
But is the theory in accord with the scene I have described above? In fact, the scene might lead us to a more nuanced or less categorical view of the problem of obesity (and, by extension, of other social problems) than we might at first adopt.
March 29, 2019
March 22, 2019
The rise of the neo-barbarians and modern tribalism
Sarah Hoyt isn’t a fan of civilization being replaced by the prehistoric landscape of tribe versus tribe, forever:
Tribalism seems to be the default setting of the human race.
Maybe it’s because we’re built on the frame of Great (or at least pretty good) Apes. Band seems to be the default unit of a Great Ape.
The people who do those cute and vapid studies on how your toddler is racist — by which they mean he prefers people who look like mommy and daddy, or their surrogates in his life — don’t seem to understand that. They don’t seem to understand that for most of human existence, (prehistory is much longer than history) for a toddler to stray outside his tribe meant at best he was raised as a slave, and at worst he became lunch.
I wonder if it’s this uncritical, sort of history-and-genetics free view of the world that causes the left to think that tribes are awesome.
Might just be their usual — and honestly, isn’t it tiresome by now? — view of the world which thinks everything “natural” by which they mean pre-civilized is better. This leads to nostalgie de la boue and therefore elevates primitive/non civilized cultures over western culture.
Or perhaps it is simply the fact that Marxism was “rescued” by Gramsci. Marxism was bad enough in its inability to see individuals, and ascribing everyone to economic tribes.
[…]
Anyway, back to our point: one of the great advances of humanity, possibly as momentous as the discovery of fire, was the overcoming of tribalism.
Forging tribe-like bonds based on “we share this land” and in fact, being able to tell ourselves stories about how “everyone in this land is one people” gave rise to the city state, the country, and eventually the “community of civilized men.”
Of course, yes, Christianity had a lot to do with this, but there was some of that going on already in the Roman Empire, where Persian and Greek could both declare (after the appropriate formalities and acculturation) “Civis Romanum sum.”
As bad as the super-states of the twentieth century got — because there’s nothing as a large nation with a good dose of crazy-making philosophical theory — it allowed commerce and industry, which are miles and miles better at creating and keeping wealth than hunting-gathering.
The problem is that the left, led by Gramsci, has re-invented tribalism. And no, I don’t just mean tribalism of place of origin or color — though they include that — I mean tribalism of EVERYTHING.
Being unable to see individuals (has anyone done studies of their brain? Maybe there’s something missing) they instead keep sorting people into increasingly smaller groups based on things that have bloody nothing to do with what the person IS capable of, or thinks or believes: Color, who people sleep with, what people have between their legs, who people like to sleep with, what people call their deity, etc. etc. ad very definitely nauseum.
[…]
The other side effect of this is that everyone who isn’t a member of the tribe is potentially the enemy. This is what leads to the internecine fights within the left, and why if they should win (forbid) we’ll be stuck in civil war after civil war forever. Adapting the Arab proverb: Me and my Marxist classmates against the world; Me and my black Marxist classmates against our white Marxist classmates; Me and my black Marxist female classmates against our black Marxist male classmates; Me and my black lesbian Marxist female classmates against our black straight Marxist female classmates… and so on ad infinitum, until the tribe of one is at war with everyone else, and worse stuck in a pit of anger and resentment because he/she isn’t given all the recognition and compensation he/she should have from the rest of the world at large.
At the same time anyone outside it is viewed as less than human. This is why they think they can tell everyone to shut up because “white privilege” or “male privilege” or whatever, and they honestly think there will be no resistance and no backlash.
Debunking Stephen Jay Gould
Several years back, I linked to a David Friedman post on a study that contradicted a key argument in Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man. While I’ve read a few of his books, it’s been nearly 15 years since I last read anything by him … by now I only have a vague recollection of what he wrote, but his works were quite popular at the time. Much more recently Russell T. Warne looked at different problems in Gould’s work that are much more damaging to his reputation:
Stephen Jay Gould, the famous 20th century paleontologist, published his most celebrated work, The Mismeasure of Man, in 1981. Gould’s thesis is that throughout the history of science, prejudiced scientists studying human beings allowed their social beliefs to color their data collection and analysis. Gould believed that this confirmation bias was particularly powerful when a scientists’ beliefs were socially important to them. […] The Mismeasure of Man provides a great deal of evidence that scientists’ pre-existing beliefs color their judgment — but not in the way he intended. Rather, the book is a perfect example of the sin it purports to expose in others. Gould’s Marxist political beliefs made him attack intelligence research because he saw it as a threat to his egalitarian social goals. Ironically, it was this allegiance to ideology over data that made Gould himself a classic examplar of a biased scientist.
[…]
Most criticism of The Mismeasure of Man was confined to the recherché world of psychologists who study intelligence. However, a new debate opened up in 2011 when a team of anthropologists argued that Gould’s analysis of the data on cranium measurements from 19th century scientist Samuel George Morton was flawed. Gould cast Morton as a racist who fudged his data to match his beliefs about white racial superiority because of a supposed larger skull capacity. Instead, the anthropologists argued, it was Gould who manipulated the data to support his biases.
This ignited a series of follow-up articles in the scholarly literature by authors taking a variety of positions regarding Morton’s data and Gould’s interpretations. Weisberg believed that the re-analysis was flawed and Gould was mostly correct. Kaplan and his colleagues claimed that Morton’s interpretations were flawed, but that Gould was incorrect in believing that he could discern Morton’s actions and motivations. Finally, Mitchell believed that Morton’s data were accurate and that the interpretations were colored by the racism of the era, but the claim that Morton subtly manipulated the data was a fiction created by Gould.
Though still unresolved, the debate shows that a critical analysis of specific sections of The Mismeasure of Man is warranted. After writing an article about Lewis Terman, an important developer of early intelligence tests, I decided that a 23-page section of The Mismeasure of Man would be a valuable section of the book to analyze. This section is Gould’s description and analysis of the Army Beta test, one of the tests that Terman helped create. The Army Beta was used in World War I to screen illiterate recruits for military service.
Having read some of the primary scholarly work about the Army Beta, I knew that some of Gould’s claims were inaccurate. However, I was unprepared for the level of pervasive deception that I encountered when I carefully checked Gould’s claims against the historical record. Moreover, I discovered overwhelming evidence that any pretense of Gould being “objective” — even if defined as “fair treatment of data” — is a farce. In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould elevates his biases to the status of uncontestable facts and to great lengths to hide the truth from his readers.
March 15, 2019
Charles De Gaulle
Colby Cosh linked to an interesting Peter Hitchens review of a recent biography of Charles De Gaulle (De Gaulle by Julian Jackson):
General Charles de Gaulle, Commander of Free French Forces, seated at his desk in London during the Second World War.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
When it came to what de Gaulle thought was the pivotal moment in his life, when he could become virtual monarch of France under conditions chosen wholly by himself, he was as ruthless as Lenin. He had, it is often said, a “certain idea of France.” But the ultra-conservative lawyer, Jacques Isorni, whose clients included the collaborationist Vichy leader Marshal Philippe Pétain and de Gaulle’s would-be assassin, Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, concluded that it was “an abstract idea of France, indifferent to the sufferings of the French people.” There is something to this. De Gaulle represented the steely warlike France, summoned up by Bonaparte and again a century later at Verdun, for which the French were required to die and mourn uncomplainingly. For him, Paris was well worth a lie or a betrayal, because his supremacy was so essential for the country he loved.
The costs of de Gaulle’s idea of France were high. As the general himself once mused, “There is no action in which the devil has no part.” The two massacres, and the charnel-house stench which clings to them, are evidence of the reliable rule that even — often especially — the greatest and best of men have terrible flaws and can do terrible things; and also of the other rule that power tends to corrupt. I have begun with them because they are a necessary antidote to the feelings of admiration and liking which any reader of this thrilling, witty, ceaselessly moving, beautifully written account of a truly great man is bound to feel.
Charles de Gaulle’s life would perhaps have been better lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, in times when personal courage, mystical imagination, chivalry, and religious fervor were more welcome than they are now. In this world of the United Nations, risk assessment, lawyers, Geneva Conventions, television and superpowers, there is not really enough room for such a man to swing his sword, just as there is no room for old-fashioned great powers in the shadow of superpowers. Had he not been so magnificent, he would have been ridiculous. He looked, more than anything else, like a camel, not least because of the superior expression on his face suggesting that he alone knew the secret One Hundredth Name of God, which camels are supposed to know.
He was filled with shining, old-fashioned beliefs about honor, courage, shame and humiliation, glory and infamy. And as those who conversed with him found, he was perhaps the last great man to make it his business to know those things that it is proper for a king to know. He could talk fluently with philosophers and literary novelists. He had a minute knowledge of history: not just that of France, but of Europe and the world. After many, many conversations with Winston Churchill, a large number of them furious quarrels, he concluded that England’s savior was not in fact very intelligent. He believed wartime, with its austerity and tests of manhood, was more virtuous than peacetime. He believed nothing important could be achieved without recklessness. He stood up to people with considerable courage, even when he was a powerless and lonely figure without soldiers, money, or supporters. He once justified his bloody-minded awkwardness by pointing out that if he were not so difficult, he would himself have been a collaborator. He said “If I were easy to work with, I would be on Marshal Petain’s staff.” He had no time for people like himself. He confessed, “I only esteem those who stand up to me but unfortunately I cannot stand them.”
De Gaulle possessed that great chivalrous virtue of being ready to walk unbowed and defiant in front of the powerful, while being gentle and even submissive to the defenseless and weak. He once became so angry with Churchill that he smashed a chair in his presence to emphasize his rage. Likewise, he defied Franklin Roosevelt over and over again. But he would go home after these battles to sing tender love songs to his daughter Anne, who suffered from Down syndrome. The tiny glimpses we have of this part of his life, obtained from the accidental observations of others, tear at the heart. His concern for Anne was entirely private and not at all feigned. After any long absence from home his first act was to rush up to her room. She died, aged twenty, in his arms. At her funeral, he comforted his wife Yvonne with the words, “Maintenant, elle est comme les autres” (“Now she is like the others”), which must be one of the most moving things said in the whole twentieth century.
March 5, 2019
Mythology Matters – Wendigo Origins – Extra Mythology – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 4 Mar 2019Did you know that the Wendigo myth can be thought of as a warning against overconsumption of the natural world? We talk about this and other fun facts that we didn’t really get to cover in our animated Wendigo episode!
March 1, 2019
QotD: Toxic masculinity
Thanks to the new guidelines from the American Psychological Association (APA) for practice with men and boys, male psychology is no longer a mystery and mental health professionals are now equipped with the tools they need to combat the worst forms of it. According to the APA, boys and men are at risk of suffering from traditional masculinity which is on the whole unhealthy. Turns out, the traditional masculinity that drives many of us men to be confident, assertive, adventurous, stoic, and willing to take risks for our goals, the people we love, and sometimes even complete strangers are bad for us and society.
Who knew?
Biologists, philosophers, theologians, physicians, parents, and really almost all regular folk have long believed that there are meaningful and biologically-based psychological differences between males and females. Fortunately for us mere mortals, the APA is setting the record straight. It is an oppressive patriarchy, not biology, that has shaped our psychology. Gender and the masculine traits associated with being male are social constructs. The APA obviously isn’t denying that evolution is true. They aren’t some kind of silly group of religious fundamentalists. But like most educated progressives, they understand that evolution stopped at the neck.
There is this odd group of evolutionary psychologists who seem hell-bent on holding onto antiquated views about human mental and social life. It seems pretty clear that these individuals are the academic wing of the alt-right. Don’t be fooled by surveys suggesting the majority of evolutionary psychologists self-identify as liberal. We can’t trust people to self-report their own politics. Only the most enlightened are in a position to tell everyone else what they really think. I would laugh at how ridiculous the academics are who continue to insist that males and females are distinct in any meaningful way, but I now know that comedy is a form of oppression.
Perhaps the saddest part of reading the new APA guidelines is realizing just how many American boys and men suffer from traditional masculinity and don’t even realize it, and how many mothers and wives tolerate and even promote this sickness. There are millions of couples and families across the United States who are living lives imprisoned by traditional gender roles and on the surface appear to be happy and flourishing. I especially feel for all the conservatives and devout Christians who are most vulnerable to this illness. It doesn’t help when alt-right institutions such as Harvard publish research suggesting that children may benefit from being raised in such traditionally religious homes.
Clay Routledge, “Thank you, APA”, Quillette, 2019-01-22.
February 11, 2019
The “sports gene”
In his most recent newsletter, Andrew Heaton regrets not having inherited the “sports gene”:
I honestly believe (and science will vindicate this) that there is such a thing as a “sports gene,” and I don’t have one.
I *wish* I did. I like meeting people, and sports and weather are good conversation starters. (Except for the few people who don’t like sports, or live in hermetically-sealed biodomes.) I’ll have a hard time if I ever run for state legislature if I’m constantly trying to pivot conversation away from football and back towards Robert Heinlein novels.
Aside from the social benefits of being sporty, I also get the distinct impression that I’m missing out on some fundamental part of the human experience. In clips of football games, when the team shoots the ball through the big wicket, people erupt into a state of enraptured ecstasy which is only available to me through abusing prescription drugs. That looks like a fun thing to be a part of, if only it could light up the absent sports chunk of my brain. I think I can glom onto some of that group joy dynamic via singing, but Broadway sing-a-longs are less pervasive in our culture than sports bars.
That said, much as I’d love to get a sports gene infusion so I can join in on the fun, when it happens I pledge to be less obnoxious in bars. Why are sports fans allowed to scream in bars but nobody else is? If there’s a basketball game on, it’s completely socially acceptable to yell like a lunatic when the tall guys launch the ball through the net wicket. Were I to see a preview for “Picard” or a thrilling policy debate on CSPAN, and lose my mind screaming and clapping, people would beat me to death with a pool cue. How about no more screaming in bars?
You can sign up for his newsletter here.
February 10, 2019
QotD: Hell is other drivers
There are many reasons to become a more competent and more conscious user of the American road, but allow me to acquaint you with one reason that you’ll regret having done so: once you get to the point where every action you take behind the wheel has a defined and precise purpose, you will find the unconscious and purposeless actions of everybody on the road around you to be utterly maddening. I’m talking about the people who wander from lane to lane for no reason. The drivers who speed up to match you as you pass them on the freeway, not out of anger or machismo but simply because their subconscious herd-animal instincts tell them that it’s completely safe and comforting to be driving at 75mph next to another 4,000-pound unguided missile. Tailgaters. People who can’t merge at speed. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
I’m not saying that road rage and aggressive driving isn’t a problem in the United States — it obviously is — but much of the bizarre behavior you see out there on the road is simply due to the fact that the average driver puts no more thought into his choices behind the wheel than I do into selecting toilet paper at the supermarket. They aren’t trying to offend you or “beat” you. They’re just kind of stroking along on instinct and the dimly remembered lessons of high-school driver’s ed. That’s why you will have somebody blow by you in a 55 zone only to hold you up in the 75 zone that follows: they aren’t even looking at the speed limit signs. Instead, they’re simply doing a speed that feels comfortable to them. It’s completely unconscious.
Jack Baruth, “How To Mentally Manipulate Your Fellow Drivers: This is not the lane you’re looking for…”, Road and Track, 2017-03-07.
February 5, 2019
Mythology Matters – Extra Mythology – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 4 Feb 2019Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
We’ll periodically, in-between series, do a Mythology Matters video, where we talk about some of the writing and research choices we made and topics we didn’t really get to cover in the full illustrated episodes. Let’s talk about plot holes and discrepancies in the myths we’ve covered so far, and the parallels we see between myths from completely different cultures!
January 28, 2019
Is there a championship for solipsistic self-absorption?
If so, then “Alex” here is an Olympic-class competitor:
The routine of a man called Alex starts as follows (he wakes between 5:55 and 6:45):
I wake up and immediately rehydrate. Your body is most absorbent after you sleep, so the first thing you put in it is the most important. I have a glass of Rebel Kitchen raw coconut water (you should be drinking slightly pink coconut water not white, as that’s more concentrated) and dilute it with water at a ratio of 2:1. I take multi-vitamins and vitamin C boosters.
Where, one might ask, does he sleep? The Sahara desert? More likely Chiswick or Clapham (prosperous districts of the inner part of outer London, where the worried-well who think of illness as an infringement of human rights congregate in droves). I was reminded of the medical students whom I used to examine, who brought bottles of water with them to the exam as if it were being held at an open-air bus station in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania.
Having resuscitated himself physically, Alex attends to his soul:
I do some meditation, where I might recite some mantras. One of them is, “All my relationships are harmonious and full of love,” which is good if you are working with difficult clients.”
Compared with this, Uriah Heep was straight-talking and plain-dealing; but what is most evident in this “mantra” (a word with spiritual connotations) is its complete solipsism. Alex’s relationships, if they can be called that, are either entirely with himself or delusional, because a relationship with another that is full of love requires that the other person should love as well as be loved, for otherwise it is not a relationship.
Having sung some “really relatable mantras,” he “focuses on each inhale and exhale for five minutes” before taking himself off to the gym for a little “yoga, cardio and weight-training,” after which he returns home — it is now 7:45 — to “have a shot of coconut water and glutamine.” By now, he says, his serotonin levels are through the roof, and he showers with organic products and moisturizes with vitamin E oil.
During the rest of the day, he eats nuts, drinks green juice, and swallows activated charcoal and two apple cider vinegar tables “to help with digestion,” as well as digestive enzymes “to help distribute the nutrients all over my body.” And if, when turning in for the night after all this care for himself (and a second spell in the gym), he feels under the weather, he swallows some almond milk with turmeric. Naturally, he believes in the healing, or at least the prophylactic, powers of crystals, and keeps one on his desk, and works by the light of a Himalayan salt lamp, which “helps to absorb the magnetic and radioactive waves that are all around you from wifi and your computer.” All that is missing from his regime to render himself immortal is Hopi ear candles, coffee enemas, and red flannel underwear.
January 27, 2019
QotD: Political tribalism
This is one of my emerging rules of politics: if one political group holds a position that does not seem consistent or logical in the context of their other positions, assume they are holding this position because their rival political group has already staked out the opposite side.
Warren Meyer, “Tribalism”, Coyote Blog, 2017-02-17.
